Improve Site and Page Authority: If The site and page authority of your site is lower than that of your competitor get mentioned by others: clients, citation websites, etc.. These metrics are used by search engines to determine the credibility and relevance of a website. You can improve these metrics by gaining high-quality backlinks from reputable websites.

Optimize Meta Descriptions: Make sure the meta descriptions are well-written, but it could be optimized further by including more relevant keywords. This can help improve the website’s visibility in search engine results.

Improve Keyword Usage: Do an analysis. If that doesn’t show specific keywords that are close to your needs, then it’s time to do some competitive research. It’s important to identify and use relevant keywords in the website’s content, meta tags, and alt tags to improve its search engine rankings.

Content Updates: Regularly updating the website with fresh, high-quality content can help improve its search engine rankings. This could be in the form of blog posts, new product descriptions, or updates to existing content.

Improve Load Speed: Loading speed is a tie-breaker when it comes to awarding ranking. It’s always beneficial to aim for the fastest load speed possible. This can be achieved by optimizing images, reducing the use of unnecessary scripts, and using a reliable hosting service.

Use H1, H2, H3 Tags Effectively: These tags are used by search engines to understand the content of a webpage. Make sure to use these tags effectively to highlight the main topics and subtopics of your content. H1, H2, etc. are organization tags that can get formatted. Don’t fall into the trap of using them to block out space. Pay attention to the hierarchy. Likewise, using orderered and unordered lists is a good way to organize content for search engines and users alike.

Robots.txt: This is a file that is usually generated by a plugin like Yoast SEO. It will tell search engines to ignore some pages. It can also point to an XML sitemap.

XML Sitemap: Plugins like Yoast SEO can auto-generate all of the code needs to tell a search engine where your important pages and contents reside. It spoon feeds the search engine paths to your content.

SEO is a long-term strategy and improvements may take time to show results. It’s also important to regularly monitor and adjust your SEO strategy based on changes in search engine algorithms and competitor activities.

The post How To Get Your House In Order – Technical Improvements To Web Design appeared first on Web321: WordPress Updates and Support.

The post Hiring a Webmaster vs. Retaining a Web Management Company appeared first on Web321: WordPress Updates and Support.

When it comes to web design, there are many designers and packages available. Various players in the web industry have tried to differentiate themselves with new features and buzzwords – but how many of these “premium features” are actually standard? In many cases, your provider may be artificially throttling a feature they get for free, or in unlimited supply, just to turn around and sell it to you as something special.

When looking for your next website design, make sure that you are not paying a premium for the following features: 

1. WordPress Website

WordPress websites are fast, powerful, and secure – but they are built using open-source software which, on its own, is free. Web developers may use WordPress as a foundation to build great websites, but they aren’t paying anything for the tool they’re using. Granted, it does take a small amount of effort for a developer to install WordPress and connect it to a database, but that’s true of any website content management system. WordPress should be marketed as a feature – because it’s definitely one of the better platforms out there – but if a package charges you a premium for WordPress, look out!

2. Mobile-Ready

In a time where almost everything is digitally driven, 45-55% of website audiences are viewing sites using mobile devices. In fact, having a mobile-ready (“responsive”) website is more important than ever! 57% of users visiting a non-responsive website on their mobile device won’t recommend that business.   A good web designer should make every site they build responsive by default, without a premium charge. If your designer is trying to tack on extra fees for this “feature”, look elsewhere!

3. 99% Uptime 

Website uptime is the time that a website or web service is available to the users (“up”) over a given period. Optimal website uptime is 99.9%, which guarantees your website is up and running with only 43 minutes of downtime out of the 720 hours in a month. 

If your website has an uptime of 99%, out of the 720 hours in a month, your website will have a downtime of 7.2 hours per month. That difference is huge!

A 99% uptime guarantee is nothing special and falls far short of the minimum 99.9% uptime you should be looking for. If you’re being charged a premium for 99% uptime, in our opinion, you’re getting fleeced.

4. Unlimited Email Addresses 

Hearing “unlimited” always sounds like a win and mentally justifies a premium price. However, you may not know that most hosting comes with unlimited email addresses for your domain – all your web designer has to do is activate them for you. What’s actually limited is the drive space available on the server – and most providers will cap the size of each email account to prevent hitting the drive space limit. Essentially, if your web designer is charging you extra for more email addresses, they are charging you a premium for something they get for free.

To put this in perspective, imagine a pizza parlour offering you a pizza that has 20 slices. This sounds like a great deal, however, is the pizza really any bigger than if they cut the same pizza into 10 slices? Be careful you aren’t paying more money for the same thing just because there’s a more impressive number attached.

5. Unlimited Blogging 

Here’s another example of how packages use the word “unlimited” to create the illusion of a juicy deal. The space available on your server, or server farm will reach a cap at some point. However, this cap is usually very large and isn’t a problem for most businesses (unless you’re an extremely large firm such as Facebook).  

When it comes to blogging, you shouldn’t have a limit to how much you can publish. Blogging as a tool on your platform helps create viewership on your website and demonstrates your thought leadership. It gives you the opportunity to drive search traffic, generates leads, and acts as content for email newsletters. 

If you’re given a limit of how many blogs you can post on your website, your provider is artificially throttling your growth simply so they can ask you for more money. The only limit on how much you blog isn’t server space – it’s subject matter and time. (We can actually help with that, too.)

6. Unlimited Form Submissions

Forms on your website allow your future clients to contact you about purchasing your services, request quotes, or inquire about your company. Form submissions are the key to successful conversion on your website. 

Some providers are stingy with their bandwidth, and will actually throttle the number of form submissions you’re allowed – even though their capacity to handle form submissions is huge! This means that at some point, you’ll reach a limit of form submissions for a given time frame. If you want more, you’ll have to shell out extra money for this “feature”. Not cool.

7. Content Editors 

As your business grows, you’ll probably look towards hiring talent to contribute or edit the content on your website. A hidden element of some packages is artificial “limits” to how many content editors you are allowed on your website. On WordPress websites, for example, there are no practical limits to how many editors you can add to the site – unless your web developer imposes one.

When it comes to your website, you may want to limit the number of content contributors for administrative or tracking purposes, but your web provider should never impose a technical limit on this number. If they do, they’re likely looking to make an extra buck off you.

Web321 is Different

At Web321, we know you don’t have money to waste. You shouldn’t need to bribe your web design, web management or hosting company for features that should come standard. Our pricing structure is simple – $321 for everything you need, no artificial limits imposed. That means if we don’t pay for it, neither do you.

So if you want an all-in-one web design, hosting, and management experience that includes standard in every build:

• WordPress website platform
• mobile responsiveness for every screen size
• free premium plugins
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• unlimited email addresses
• unlimited blogging
• unlimited form submissions
• unlimited content editors
• unlimited done-for-you content updates
• and a lot more…

…visit our website at https://web321.co or email us at contact@web321.co for info.

The post It’s 2023: These Are Seven “Features” That Shouldn’t Cost Extra appeared first on Web321: WordPress Updates and Support.

Being the most superior CMS in this industry, WordPress stands above its rival brands and constitutes a good amount of market share. The sheer scope and size of the impact of WordPress are huge, which is why we have gathered some shocking stats to help you put into perspective.

The Project Cost Calculator of Open Hub claims that WordPress took approximately 112 person-years to build itself with 423,759 lines of code and an approximate cost of $6 million to fund the size of this project.

The WordPress platform is a simple and free content management system that involves varying levels of technical knowledge to develop impressive and innovative websites and web content. The boundless library of plugins and themes boosts the possibility of this platform.

If you want to make an online appearance today, you can follow the WordPress stats that can help you to gain an online presence. The following are the important WordPress stats in 2020 that you may need to know –

• WordPress powers 35 percent of the internet with a 2 percent surge in contrast with early 2019 and a 4 percent increase compared to 2019.
• If you consider the sites built by only CMS, around 60 percent of the CMS-built sites are WordPress.
• Around 661 WordPress websites pop up every day.
• Back in 2018, non-English WordPress downloads outpaced the English ones.

These numbers are facts that are important since WordPress plays a vital role in the online marketing environment.

The capabilities and contribution of this platform have motivated others to level their playing field and compete. The central determiner of the effectiveness of this platform is not the net worth but their creativity. This is why it is possible for small businesses to compete with global companies who enjoy major marketing budgets.

• 59% of websites using well-known content management systems are using WordPress. There are around 46.2 percent sites globally that do not use a CMS and the rest depend on WordPress.
• There are 64 million websites that employ WordPress in absolute measures. This stat is based on the global count of active sites, according to the Netcraft.
• WordPress is accountable for the added 1.1 million domain registration every half-yearly. This stat is an estimated value from 2015. The actual value is likely to be more since the level of market penetration and domain registration of WordPress have risen.
• Around 34 percent of the 10,000 most famous websites across the world use WordPress. These famous sites are Etsy, Reuters, TED, Whitehouse.gov, Yelp, TechCrunch, The New Yorker, and People. Among international celebrities, Snoop Dogg, Justine Bieber, Katy Perry, Jay Z, and Stephen Fry also use this platform.
• The second most commonly used CMS, Joomla, constitutes 5.7 percent of the market share. This positively skewed market has many competitors but only one of them has been able to take an enormous lead. Drupal, Shopify, and Squarespace follow Joomla with market shares of 3.7%, 2.4%, and 2.5%, respectively.
• WordPress 4.9 version has been downloaded around 159 million times. When you read this article, WordPress downloads would cross 160 million.
• WordPress receives unique monthly visitors the same as Twitter. According to Twitter stats, unique monthly visits are around 152 million in the US but for WordPress, it is around 149 million. Both Amazon (with 199 million visits) and Twitter recently ranked lower than WordPress in terms of unique monthly visitors.
• WordPress users create around 52.1 million comments and 70.5 million new posts every month. This blogging platform encourages a huge population across the world to initiate discussions and add fresh content every month.
• A total of 409 million users view at least 21.1 billion pages every month on the popular WordPress sites. For daily content consumption, a higher count of users views WP blogs.
• WooCommerce constitutes 27.7 percent of the market share among all eCommerce platforms. This is vital information for all online businesses. Online business platforms let merchants build digital stores to allow transactions online. WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform of WordPress that is growing faster than the competitors such as Shopify and Squarespace.
• Around 13.2 percent of all sites use WooCommerce.
• 7.5 million spam comments are blocked by Akismet every hour. Akismet is a famous WordPress plugin that saves its users who deal with spam. Spam is one of the most common nuisances online today.
• In 2017, the 3 best WordPress plugins were WordPress Importer, WooCommerce, and the All in One SEO Pack.

The WordPress usability statistics in 2020 are as follows –

• WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org. These 2 versions can be very confusing. The latter is a free and open-source CMS built for the WP software. Whereas, WordPress.com is the blogging platform that is based on the said software.
• To host an appreciable WordPress site, it costs as low as $60. At this cost, you also get unmetered bandwidth and sufficient storage. In the case of a high-traffic site, you might have to go for expensive versions such as the managed WordPress hosting.
• Being platform-agnostic, WordPress provides native applications for common platforms such as iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Android, and even Blackberry. You can use all the functions regardless of what system you are using.
• WordPress is currently offering 47,350 active plugins out of a sum of 56,311 plugins listed by the Plugin Directory for WordPress.
• Around 80 to 90 percent of the SEO mechanics are taken care of by WordPress. This stat was mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2009 who was the head of Google’s webspam group. The platform is still continuing to make it more SEO-friendly with more plugins to assist its users in getting the SEO right.
• At least 36 percent of WordPress sites are served by HTTPS. This figure denotes an increase of more than double from 2016.
• Being the fastest growing web-publishing platform, WordPress helps you to draw more traffic with higher ranks of WordPress keywords than its competitors.
• Despite issues, Jetpack is the most accepted WordPress plugin for all marketers. It is a free tool, facilitating vital tasks such as social media integration, traffic insight, security, and backups.
• WordPress employs not more than 800 workers worldwide, the majority of which are from the US. They collaborate from their residence and they ensure that the requirements of all countries are met.
• WordPress involves more than 100 contributors. Being the world’s one of the biggest open-source platforms, it has 100 contributors in the developer team, containing more than 430,000 lines of codes.
• Taking 2020 as an exception to the rule, WordPress has helped 128 WordCamps in around 48 countries, involving 1091 sponsors and 2310 speakers in 2017.
• This WP platform has also had 4379 meetups, a surge of 43 percent compared to 2016. Above 99 thousand people attended the meetups which were a whopping rise of 65 percent from 2016. The reason for this upsurge was because of the introduction of the Events widget in the WP 4.8 version.
• Some of the amazing WordPress sites are shown at WordPress.org site. The platform showcases the best sites and the list includes names like the City University of New York, the Obama Foundation, and the Houston Zoo.
• A typical WordPress developer earns an average of $50,365 in the US.
• WordPress has denied around 61 percent of DMCA takedown notices. This has added transparency to functionality, security, and versatility. DMCA notices are filed by individuals or companies if they find any posts on the platform trespassing on intellectual property rights.
• WP has also denied around 65 percent of government information requests. WordPress not only cooperates with the government on important and valid cases but also strongly resists circulating information that puts the blogger’s freedom of expression at stake.
• The major WordPress versions are released after approximately 152 days.
• Most number of downloads on WordPress is done on Wednesdays and least on Fridays.

To sum up, WordPress is one of the most widely known content management systems and blogging platforms.

The above WordPress stats prove that the popularity of this platform is not only because of its simplicity and low costs but also other factors such as a wide range of themes and plugins, security, SEO-friendliness, and language packs availability.

The popular platform has journeyed a long way. It has evolved from basic and simple blogging too to a global phenomenon, endorsed by some of the biggest brands and popular celebrities. The features of WordPress are particularly helpful for small and medium businesses since it allows the use of high-functioning and attractive websites without having an expert developer or big budget.

The shocking WordPress stats provided in the article prove the capacity of this platform and why it has spread to such a large extent in terms of usability, web standards, security, etc. The WordPress community is flourishing at an increasing rate every day.

References

https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/

https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/#gref

https://digital.com/wordpress-hosting/wordpress-stats/

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